He sorrowed keenly for his two friends Basil Mierowitz and Apollo Usakoff, for both were polished and educated gentlemen, men of a class and style more common in some corps of the Russian army now, than in those days. And there was poor Mariolizza, too—so brightly beautiful, so happy, and so merry! Her love, her hopes and schemes, would all be crushed and blighted, as well as his own.
Balgonie was not without fears for himself, and of being compromised in the affair; or, perhaps, lured into subtle state intrigues and deep plots, in the failure or success of which he could have no interest politically or personally, save in his love for Natalie—a love that had changed the whole current of his ideas and opened up a new realm of thought and incentive to action.
Already he was beginning to revolt at the Russian service, and yet he had been happy in the Regiment of Smolensko, and had found in the land of his adoption, like every Scottish adventurer that has trod the Russian soil, honours scarcely to be won at home.
How long was he to be on the staff of this ferocious Commandant, and in this horrible prison, where many an innocent victim was pining hopelessly in chains and misery? "The mutual distrust in which people live in Russia," says the Abbé Chappe D'Auteroche in his scarce travels about this time, "and the total silence of the nation upon everything which may have the least relation either to the government or the sovereign, arise chiefly from the privilege every Russian has, without distinction, of crying out in public, slowo dielo; that is to say, 'I declare you are guilty of high treason, both in words and actions.' All the bystanders are then obliged to assist in arresting the person so accused; a father his son, and the son his father, while nature suffers in silence. The accuser and accused are at once conveyed to prison, and afterwards to St. Petersburg, where they are tried by the Secret Court of Chancery."
Thanks to this pleasant state of society, the chambers and chains of Schlusselburg were seldom unoccupied.
Vlasfief was hollow-hearted, avaricious, and sensual; Tschekin, the Lieutenant, a slimy, cruel, reckless, and ignorant Muscovite; but old Bernikoff was really a character whom Balgonie equally dreaded and despised.
His subtlety and oppression had been the means of reducing, at different times, some thirty officers to the ranks, with permission to serve and work their way up again; and many more were now cursing him and their fate, at Irkutsk and remoter Siberia, for their inability to purchase his mercy or good-will. When commanding at Cronstadt, he had been detected once in the act of transmitting whole sledge loads of government shot, shell, lead, and ropes, across the frozen gulf for sale in Sweden; and also in buying at a cheap rate base denuscas to pay the troops: but so trusted was the old rascal by the Empress, that he always escaped the degradation, the hanging or shooting, which, on those discoveries, were so freely meted out to his subalterns.
On the estate of Bernikoff a serf once amassed ten thousand roubles, and offered them for the freedom of his daughter, who was about to be married.
"Let me see the girl!" was the reply.
As a serf can possess nothing, the father trembled in his soul at this demand, as his daughter, unfortunately for herself, was beautiful.